Jews in the European Nation-State (“The Jewish Question”)
Name: ____________________________
Period: _____
Directions: Carefully read pp.744-746 (From “Jews in the European Nation-State” through “The Zionist
Movement.”). After that, read “The Voice of Zionism: Theodor Herzl and the Jewish State” – primary source on
p.747. Answer questions attached to that primary source below in complete sentences. After that, examine the
website on Alfred Dreyfus and the Dreyfus Affair (see attached link below) and read the article at the end of
this handout. Answer the last question in a well-developed paragraph (“chunk” or “double – chunk”).
THE VOICE OF ZIONISM: THEODOR HERZL AND THE JEWISH STATE
Questions from p.747:
1. What forces in European society came together to intensify anti-Semitism in the late nineteenth
century?
2. What was the relationship between nationalism and Zionism at this time?
3. Was Herzl’ Zionism simply a reaction to Western anti-Semitism, or did other developments also
contribute to his movement?
Web-site on Alfred Dreyfus and the Dreyfus Affair:
http://novaonline.nvcc.edu/eli/evans/his102/notes/dreyfus.html
France is still fractured by the Dreyfus Affair1
Nationalists were fixated on the idea that there was a conspiracy against Catholicism –
and the most obvious culprits were the Jews
By Piers Paul Read (January 2012)
Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), the man whose case divided France Photo: ALAMY
France in the last decades of the 19th century saw an extraordinary flourishing in the arts, the sciences and technology
which, along with its climate of sexual permissiveness, earned this period the title of la belle époque. To celebrate these
achievements, the French government prepared for a Universal Exposition in Paris in 1900, with an ambitious programme
of building that included two railway stations, Gare de Lyon and Gare d’Orsay, and two exhibition halls, the Grand and
the Petit Palais.
These plans were suddenly jeopardised, in the autumn of 1899, by an international campaign to boycott the exhibition, a
result of the outrage felt throughout the world at the conviction, at a court martial in Rennes, of a Jewish officer, Alfred
Dreyfus, on charges of passing secret documents to the Germans. This was his second court martial. The first, five years
earlier, had led to a sentence of life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. A campaign by his family, his lawyer and a small
number of supporters had eventually uncovered overwhelming evidence that the traitor was not Dreyfus but another
officer, Charles Walsin-Esterhazy. However, senior officers on the general staff and in military intelligence feared that to
admit a miscarriage of justice would not just lose them their jobs but discredit the army. To thwart a revision of the case
against Dreyfus, they resorted to a series of threats, forgeries and dirty tricks.
On January 13, 1898, France’s leading novelist, Émile Zola, entered the fray with a polemic, J’Accuse, naming the
officers responsible for the conspiracy against Dreyfus. It was hailed as heroic by the Left, outrageous by the Right, and
provoked anti-Semitic riots throughout France. Opinion abroad was incredulous. How could France, the most civilised
country in Europe, experience this eruption of medieval barbarism? Why had the case of one Jewish officer led to this
rage against all Jews?
The fuse leading to this explosion of ancient animosities can be traced back to the revolution of 1789, which emancipated
the Jews but also led to a persecution of Catholics so savage that it was, in the view of the historian Michael Burleigh,
“tantamount to genocide”. The mutual antagonism between conservative Catholics and radical republicans simmered
throughout the 19th century. Unlike Britain, where radicalism was largely Christian in inspiration, in France it was
militantly atheist – and the free-thinking heirs of the revolutionaries of 1789 made common cause, against what they
perceived as bigoted and reactionary Catholics, with Protestants, Freemasons and Jews.
Thanks to the growth in industry and a money economy, Protestants and Jews had become rich and powerful: they
controlled the “commanding heights of the economy”. The conspicuous consumption and political corruption of this new
plutocracy provoked resentment, particularly since, at a time of growing national rivalries, it was felt that neither
Protestants nor Jews were “true Frenchmen of France”.
1
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/9045659/France-is-still-fractured-by-the-Dreyfus-Affair.html
It became a fixation in the minds of French nationalists – not just rioters in cities like Rennes or Nantes but cultivated
intellectuals – that there was a conspiracy to destroy France’s Catholic identity. The most easily identifiable enemies were
the Jews, because many were rich and their talents had led to a disproportionate presence in the judiciary, the civil service,
the press and even the army. Moreover, most came from Alsace, had Germanic names, and some, like Dreyfus, spoke
with a German accent.
It is not always made clear in accounts of the Dreyfus Affair that many Dreyfusards were quite as anti-Semitic as their
opponents. Zola himself has anti-Semitic stereotypes in his novels; so too the Dreyfusard authors Marcel Prévost and
Anatole France. The officer who refused to “bury” the evidence that Dreyfus was innocent was vocally anti-Semitic,
whereas a number of the anti-Dreyfusards abhorred anti-Semitism.
Nor were the Dreyfusards all motivated by a disinterested passion for justice. Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau, a prominent
lawyer, refused to defend Dreyfus for fear that it would jeopardise his political career. As a friend of Edgar Demange,
who did take the brief, he must have known that the conviction was unsound, but he kept his head down until it became
politically advantageous to join the Dreyfusards.
It was Waldeck-Rousseau, by then prime minister, who faced the prospect of an international boycott of the Universal
Exposition. He advised the President to pardon Dreyfus, and arranged an amnesty for anyone involved in the affair. He
then turned on the Catholic religious orders, making them scapegoats for the villainy of the dozen or so officers who had
conspired to keep Dreyfus on Devil’s Island. Only one of them was a practising Catholic but, on the pretext that Jesuits
had been behind conspiracies against the government, Waldeck-Rousseau, and later Emile Combes, passed laws
dissolving religious orders and closing Catholic schools.
To Waldeck-Rousseau, the religious orders were the “moral culprits” of the affair. “If Dreyfus and his friends become
historians and write textbooks,” wrote the anti-Dreyfusard author Maurice Barrès, “we shall be the villains in the eyes of
posterity.” That prediction has turned out to be more accurate than he could ever have imagined. In most histories, the
anti-Dreyfusards are indeed the villains, their anti-Semitism linked to the behaviour of the Vichy government during the
Second World War, and hence to the Holocaust. The injustices done to monks and nuns forced into exile, and parents who
wished their children to be educated in Catholic schools, were airbrushed out of the picture.
In 1906, seven years after his pardon, Dreyfus was declared innocent by the French Court of Appeal, reinstated in the
Army and awarded the Légion d’Honneur. He was never acquitted, as he had hoped, by his fellow officers in a court
martial.
In 1994, the Director of the Historical Section of the French Army stated that Dreyfus’s innocence was merely “a thesis
generally admitted by historians”. He was sacked, and Dreyfus’s innocence declared indisputable by his successor. It
illustrated, once again, the difficulty of approaching with even-handed detachment this critical event in the history of
France.
Piers Paul Read’s 'The Dreyfus Affair: The Story of the Most Infamous Miscarriage of Justice in French History’ is
published by Bloomsbury this week
THE LAST QUESTION: (Answer on the other side of this page!)
How did the Dreyfus Affair reflect various social developments associated with the la belle epoque? (Think of positive
as well as negative developments in European society at that time (example: Benefits of industrialization, emergence
of mass society/press, rise in right-wing politics based on racism/extreme nationalism, etc.)